Some PC Multitrack Questions

[ola]

Mine is a 10,000rpm SCSI and as I wrote, SM2k's IDE os slightly faster in some aspects. The IDE vs, SCSI issue has probably been the single most discussed in this forum. My conclusion from countless articles, benchmarks and testing is that for a DAW, with relatively few but very large files, IDE will beat SCSI as often as vice versa but in server applications, with _many_ users and lots of relatively small reads/writes, SCSI is the only option. However, feel free to prove the opposite. I think a RAID0 ATA66 array is the most powerful disk option for DAWs at pressent. I will giva a report when I build my new computer, with or without dual Celerons...

I'm pretty sure that 10,000rpm IDE will prove to be the best option for DAWs but that has to be tested. ATA33 has been proved to beat ATA66 in some DAW scenarios so one never knows.

The truth is in here

/Ola

 

[zibon]

Thanks again everyone for the info. The dskbench thing had me a bit confused, as well as all of the talk of drives and their speeds (I guess I still don't know what I should be using as a comparision-what is the minimum speed I can get by with for 8 tracks 16/44?), but I ran it and my results appear to be similar to what I've seen elsewhere. My PC is just my keyboardists old setup, no special drives or anything, just the usual IDE drive that comes with a standard PC setup, but the results appear to be adequate. I don't know what drive is in there or the type of board or anything, so if it sounds like I missed something, let me know.
Also, does everyone recommend switching to NT or 2000? I've got NT 4 Workstation, so I could install it. Just wanted to see what everyone thought about NT or 2000....
I'm trying to make this purchase as trouble free as possible! Some of this stuff is making me wonder....

thanks again,
zibon

 

[zetabass]

Just thought I'd mention the midi man audio delta 10/10 8 i/o line and digital stereo i/o with midi in out and word clock and all that jazz. I love mine. I have however run into a problem with jumps and glitches in my playback I'm running win98 on a pII 350 with 64mb ram and 8m diamond stealth video card a 8+gig high speed WD HD oh and the delta
I'm Glad I didn't book any demo work for a while I just switched from a vs880 to this and the sound is great but I can't mix down because it stops/jumps/skips during playback (Very agravating) I used the echo reporter and it claims my hard drive should be able to do something like 23 playback and 7 recording tracks simultanously Not that my demo bands usually want to do that.....

Any advice on how to get this playback smoothed out?

-Brad

p.s. I already switched to server mode and disabled my video accelleration......

 

[ola]

Just a trivial thing; Have you defragmented lately (just before you mixdown)? It can make all the difference and the disk can be too fragmented in just a couple of hours if you add and delete a lot of tracks.

I suggest that you get more RAM. Double what you have now and you should get a substantial performance increase.

Also, does your SW allow you to mixdown without listening (i.e. not in realtime)? If so, you may solve the problem temporarily by mixing down at whatever speed the SW requires and check the result when it's done. It's too much of a pain to do it permanently but maybe you can do it until you figure out the problem.